Letters to Nowhere

Life is a contemplation: a static shroud of uncertainly that lingers over every waking hour. Life is a gift I didn't ask for, given to me by those almost entirely unqualified, continuing a line of trauma that settles deeply into the shells of unsuspecting children. Life is so long, and so short.

I am the generation who will end the trauma which has been passed down through bloodlines.

I am the generation who will learn to fix myself before endangering my children with the inner workings of my mind.

I. Dear Mother:

Overbearing parents create children of secrets, whose lives center more around escape than emotional vulnerability, whose fibrous shells quiver at the thought of conversation with You. I am not your little doll, to be dressed and impressioned to your liking, to be fashioned in the memory of some forgotten dream.

I could not explain the feeling that bubbles in my chest at the sound of You, a disappointment that sears through the most vulnerable parts of me. A parent's love is unconditional, unless you don't fit inside their cookie cutter.

It was never about keeping secrets. I have never fit inside your cookie cutter.

The thing about having children is that they can become anybody, and I am more like You than I'm interested in admitting.

II. Dear Father:

I am not to be owned, like an old-timey wife or a farm animal. I eat away my fears in private, heedful of the indignation ready to enkindle the weight of you at the thought of me. Your secrets were never mine to keep, never mine to be persuaded of, as though I am a friend.

Sometimes, my words become lodged in my throat as I attempt to speak, my mind a cacophony of everything I'm too nervous to say. And even if I speak in riddle, in prose, it's never the right answer. Anxiety shows itself as anger, as red, as a man throwing words at a child with no sense of caution. When you degrade me in so many ways, I become very good at doing it myself.

It's hard to be a child, pestered with inklings of self-doubt and hereditary brains, fastened together with clothing that doesn't quite fit.

Dear Father:

I'm not your little girl. You'd be rather dazed to know I'm not a girl at all.

Growing up is a mess of madness and discovery:

the kind of discovery that leaves streaks of sadness on a pillow,

the kind of madness that unravels you further the deeper you go.

III. Dear ex boyfriend:

You're a storm, a fantastic fantasma of ruin and dust, sweeping out from underneath my feet. I find a familiar sense in the spirals of cowardice. I find a consoling sort of chaos in the winding roads. As a child, I might have believed I could fix you, a boy of such trouble, a boy of such fear - but the trouble with fixing things is that I cannot fix something nobody believes is broken.

You were broken. After enough time of loving you, I was broken too.

It's a pity. You bleed so deeply that it seeps into everyone around you, leaving memories etched into the skins of all who've loved you. I used to love you. You've never loved yourself.

It's a pity, to become such an empty shell of a man, hollowed by the ghosts of lifetimes past. A man with such cold eyes, shouldering your brain games with such sense of insincerity, taking advantage of somebody weak.

I pity you.

Words that I'm incapable of saying bubble at the edges of my lips, tasting of salt, crippling my tongue like a paperweight. It's far easier to write than it is to speak, for my mind is filled with passion and pain, and my mouth falls victim to the weight of my thoughts.

It's a shame: the types of unstable adults that create broken children, leaving nothing but a trail of broken people, desperate to be saved.

IV. Dear lover:

There's a lot more to being than a father than just having a child. It takes a man of integrity, a troth of a lifetime pledged virtuous, to dare to raise the child that isn't your child. Tugging at the corners of my conscience is a voice of diffidence, an air of quasi-apathy behind a face of doubt. Sometimes you love me so hard I don't need to love myself.

It's hard to be a child, imitating those who are knowledgeable, pestered by persistent longing to be understood.

I will never be what you desire of me. Plagued by a lifetime of misinterpretation, healing to live, living to heal, you're a hydrangea.

Growing up is a mess of healing and love:

the kind of healing that starts from the inside out

the kind of love that leaves you curled up on the bathroom floor.

They say it's better to love and bleed than never love at all

and I would bleed a thousand times for someone so ethereal

V. Dear son:

I dream of a world.

Doe-eyed baby footprints that clatter along a hallway, open-mouthed breaths of fresh air can't cleanse the fright from the skies. There's innocence in your eyes.

You are a waterfall, erupting loudly at the monstrosities of your ancestors, washing away the litter that lines the lake. Forget-me-not, you bloom on the coldest days, lighting a match which sets a neighbourhood ablaze -

dreamer boy,

light up the moon with the gaze of a thousand suns.

You are a drummer boy

I am a partisan

Stumbling through the rubble which seeks to be rebuilt -

the dissonance which bursts me at the seams, I am a patchwork quilt.